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martes, 2 de agosto de 2011

[spanish] how do we know that they started to block blogs' profiles in google+? ha.

for those of you who don't usually follow us here's the particular love story we had with our beloved google in the last month.

* june 28th *
google launches google+ with a design extremely similar to this blog, as we told you here (in a humorous way but anyways...). all fine until here.

* july 5th *
we created a page for this blog in google+, and in order to push the new platform introduction we decided to invite people to google+....we invited like 300 people. all fine until here.

* july 12th *
without google informing us as the alert that many people mentioned was not available at the beginning of google+, we decided to delete the photo album that contained the blog' pictures and that google had automatically added to our new google+ profile. we just wanted to delete the pictures in google+, but google decided that our secret intention was to delete all pictures in the blog so they deleted the blog picasa album and and this blog was left with no pictures. first letdown.

* july 19th *
google finally implements the alert when you delete pictures in google+, informing that you are also removing them from picasa and blogger. 3 weeks after google+ launch and with nobody-knows-how-many pictures lost. and google tells this in a forum without even saying we are sorry. third letdown.

* july 27th *
we finished the manual upload, one by one, of the 600 blog pictures. every time a new picture is uploaded to blogger a new URL is generated, so we had to update all blog 80 posts with the new links. in order to do that, we decided to export the whole blog as an xml file, we modified the file with the new links, deleted the old posts contained in blogger and imported the new xml file to blogger...any other alternative would've been crazy (online modifying each post with no search/replace option, etc.)
however, we were astonished when we imported the whole blog back to blogger, as google decided to create a new URL for each post!. for instance, our most visited post, in which we request the spanish newspaper ABC to donate 3.000 euro to the victims of the earthquake in japan after stealing some pictures from our blog, was previously located here:

with this URL change:
- all good positions in search engines are lost: so if you search now "ojos de ella fotos abc" the search engines will take you to the old URL, which will return a 404 not found error.
- all external web links are lost, for instance menéame o any other blog. they also redirect to a 404 - not found error.

- all social networks sharing counters are gone and now all posts have been shared exactly 0 times (some of them had more than 800 shares!)
- traffic stats are messed up and same with some widgets like popular posts and so on.
this behavior, which kills your blog,is not documented in the import/export blogger tutorial. only when it happens to you you discover that it works like that by default. google doesn't warn about anything! fourth letdown.

* august 1st *we desperately asked for help to google. nodoby replies, although now they haven't removed our request, at least. fifth letdown.

here you can find google's staff from mountain view's visit to our blog to verify that we are actually not a real person and instead a huge corporation with 557 million euro of expected profits in 2011.

* conclusion *
as time goes by, google looks more and more like microsoft and their monopoly in the late 90s. but we are not the only ones who believe this, only in 2011 the cnn begins to have doubts about google's business model and their worse performance in revenues, techcrunch asks if google will manage to get its mojo back, it's now microsoft who files a monopoly complaint against google and the US Federal Trade Comission has begun to take a closer look to google's business. monopoly, as everybody knows, brings a decrease in product quality, the lack of customer support, lack of innovation, etc.